Where is Design Headed?

There are some big changes that are off the horizon for design and for the world and I think that the technology of Rapid Manufacturing will make some of these changes become a reality.

Rapid Manufacturing, just as brief introduction for the public, is the way in which you can design an object on the computer and then send the digital file directly to the manufacturing machines. So, seamlessly, even at the distance of thousand and thousands of miles you just send the file and the thing gets made.

You can understand the implication. This is quite young technology. It has been existing already for 25 years but at the beginning you could only carve foam in make prototypes and models. Now, you can make chair, it takes seven days to print a chair but in the future seven hours, then seven minutes. But think about it. First, of all you will be able to be at home and your computer. And go unto a website to a particular brand.

The designer has design the matrix of a chair, you can adopt the chair a little bit depending on how much you need to respect the limits of the brands and respect the structural soundness of the chair. But let us say, you customized it the way you want and you send a file to your corner King Coast, let us say it is King Coast and then you go down or they deliver it if you want and you got your chair printed in the next five minutes, you know half hour.

No tracking, no warehousing, no waste of materials and you will only order really what you need. Now, of course there were still be designers acting like artist that will let you use that particular file only once and then it gets into an outset, so it’s a unique piece. You know there will be still a modulation of the originality and of the number of pieces but they would be no more difference between a prototype and a serial piece. And there would be an enormous saving of energy for world.

So you see, designers would be designing families of object and not anymore singular objects if they want to. They would be designing matrixes and system and they would be teaching people how to use them. And I really believe that this would happen and it’s already happening. And there are already some designers but are particularly interested in their thinking this way. You know were just had an exhibition at MoMA that was called digitally mastered. And it was all objects that were generated directly by a computer regimen from clothes to graphics to chairs. And the future would become even more realizable and even more important.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services